Home networks are growing exponentially in their complexity. We will shortly see home networks where the computer is merely one participant among many types of devices. The number of PCs attached to home networks will be dwarfed by other devices such as televisions and DVRs that are connected directly to the home network.
Except in rare cases, the user in the home will never be an IT expert or even have more than a very limited understanding of what a network does. As more and more devices use the home network, the burden of managing the network will rapidly grow beyond the capabilities of most home users. From the user's perspective, very simple tasks will seem as though they do not work, when in reality, they do work but are being hampered by a non-optimal network configuration or by events in the network they do not understand yet could control if they were armed with the appropriate information.
Consider the network environment illustrated in FIG. 1 and the following exemplary scenario. This represents a common “starter” broadband environment for many homes. The home has a single computer 155 (“Mom's computer”) connected directly to a cable modem 150 providing broadband access to the Internet 107. The technical head of household has attached a USB camera 160 to mom's computer 155 and has set it up such that mom is able to engage in video chat sessions with her mother (i.e. grandma). This works very well for mom; she has singular access to the broadband channel into the home, which provides adequate bandwidth for a smooth audio/video stream to grandma.
This family has a daughter who has just received a laptop computer 170 for her birthday. As illustrated in FIG. 2, their network evolves to accommodate this addition. A wireless router 165 has been added to the network. The new laptop computer 170 is connected wirelessly to the router 165 and now the available bandwidth into the home from the Internet 107 is shared among multiple computers (i.e., computers 155, 170).
The daughter installs a particularly “chatty” peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing application on her computer 170, and suddenly this high bandwidth application makes resources available from the connection to the Internet 107 relatively scarce.
Mom logs on to her computer 155 and starts a video session with Grandma. It is likely that Mom's chat session will begin to experience lost packets and “jitter” as she unknowingly competes with her daughter for bandwidth. Mom's experience will be degraded. She might have some vague notion that things seemed to get worse at some point after they installed the router 165. She might blame the router 165, she might blame the broadband service provider (BSP), she may simply live with the degraded experience and think there's nothing she can do about it, or she may simply give up and decide that video chat is not a viable option.
It's unlikely that, with no experience in networking, Mom will even begin to understand that her experience is being degraded as her network packets compete with her daughter's packets for a relatively scarce resource.
Furthermore, from the perspective of the BSP, they would rather that the scarce resource of the cable feed to this family's neighborhood not be saturated with p2p file sharing traffic.
Home network monitoring is very limited at present. For the most part it is limited to watching whether or not the Internet connection is active or whether link layer connectivity is functional on the local computer's network adapter. As the number of devices on the network increases, these limitations must be addressed.